Retrospective: Nixon (Patreon)

There's a tension in Oliver Stone's Nixon between the absurdity of the real history it depicts and the flourishes and excesses of its director. Near the end, Richard Nixon (Anthony Hopkins), knowing his political career is over, asks Henry Kissinger (Paul Sorvino) to join him in prayer, and they kneel together in the Lincoln Sitting Room. We know from Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days that this scene actually happened. The brilliance of the scene in Stone's film is that it pushes the absurdity of the scenario even father: Nixon and Kissinger kneel in front of the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, while Nixon asks his Lord for forgiveness.

Like Richard Nixon, Oliver Stone has the defects of his qualities. His skills as a riveting polemicist/montage artist extraordinaire can just as often deliver dreadful cinematic diatribes as they do lovely heavy-handed political operas. In Nixon, Stone finds a protagonist whose excesses mirror his own, permitting his excesses to not only not harm the picture but elevate it significantly.

Nixon is Citizen Kane for the post-Reagan age. The film's debts to Welles are explicit, with its liberal usage of news footage, its depiction of a lonely childhood and political/economic apparatus creating a pitiful monster, and a recreation of the infamous dining room scene from Kane. Nixon, one of American history's touted monsters (although in reality, he's hardly worse than all of his successors), is made a tragic figure — a man with a kernel of decency and compassion who's fed his soul to the Beast. While Stone is ultimately a dogmatic liberal who longs for the days of the Kennedy administration, he makes an extremely trenchant critique of liberalism by painting liberalism's favorite American scapegoat as the true face of America. Stone's best movie by a country mile.